eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

09/10/2017

"But when reality has let you down"

According to the author, Simon Parkin, The following excerpt is taken from an article titled ‘Chess-playing excitement,’ published in the July 2, 1859, issue of Scientific American.

“Those who are engaged in mental pursuits should avoid a chessboard as they would an adder’s nest, because chess misdirects and exhausts their intellectual energies ... It is a game which no man who depends on his trade, business or profession can afford to waste time in practicing; it is an amusement—and a very unprofitable one—which the independently wealthy alone can afford time to lose in its pursuit. As there can be no great proficiency in this intricate game without long-continued practice, which demands a great deal of time, no young man who designs to be useful in the world can prosecute it without danger to his best interests.”

What would the author of this article think about the place that video games play in the lives of millions of people today? Parkin’s book is an attempt to better understand what it is that people find so addictively mesmerizing about computer gaming. It is not his intent to get people to quit gaming (he obviously is a practitioner and a fan). He just wants to understand how gaming functions on an emotional and instinctual level. Basically, he concludes that games become more important to us the more that they wind up meeting certain basic unmet needs. And the more important the need and the more lacking we are in an answer to that need, the more addictive a game can become. “This is their great benefit,” of computer gaming, Parkin writes: “but it's also their great peril. For some people, devotion to improving at a video game begins to mimic the unbreakable grip of substance addiction, if not the chemical dependence.”

Here are some of those human needs that computer games can be made to address, for good or bad.

One:Games can provide a person with a feeling of success in a life otherwise full of disappointment.

One of our basic human needs involves a desire for achievement. In a world where your odds of achieving success are somewhere between “not likely” and “not possible,” games are there for you. Parkins uses the following illustration of a serious World of Warcraft player.

“Boyle’s impoverished circumstances fueled his interest in the game. He had no job, a ‘horrible girlfriend,’ and a ‘slum of an apartment’ with no heating or windows. ‘I would skip showers because the place was so horrendously cold,’ he recalls. ‘I’d rather deal with the discomfort of being filthy. But in the game I was in the top five hundred players worldwide. I was a success. So there was more of a motivation to better my avatar and go for numbers in rankings than there was to further my education.”

“Video games allow the people usually picked last to become top athletes;” Parkins adds later,

“Video games allow the bullied child a power fantasy in which he or she can overcome the attackers and triumph; video games offer clear routes to victory to people who struggle to achieve on the other side of the screen.”

Two: Games can provide a feeling that the world we exist in is somehow fair or at least predictable in its unfairness.

Consider how many of us deal with disappointment and injustice poisoning and then consider how a computer game can, antidote-like, function more like the world we *want* this world to be. “For a human who has experienced life's petty and major injustices,” Parkins explains,

“What better place is there to spend one's time than in a virtual world, where struggle always leads to success, where effort is repaid in kind, where there is justice and glory for any and all who want it.”

“This is, for many, the great appeal of all games: to experience a reality that runs on unflinching logic and justice, where the rules are never broken, where randomness can be contained and tamed.”

“Video games are normally based on fairer and more just systems than those in the real world (or, at very least, on systems that tend to favor the player). That's what makes them so palatable, such wonderful places to visit.”

The author notes also that “most video games do not force you to live with your mistakes.” Something there is that draws us to a place where forgiveness actually allows us to play a mistake ridden round of our lives over. Computer games do not mind.

Three: Games can provide us a place where we can explore in a world where it seems there is nowhere in the real world left that is unknown.

Human beings are wired to explore. You can see it in babies. As we age, we are told not to - that exploring is dangerous. And then we go to school where we learn that everything worth knowing is already known. Games give us real (yet unreal) new worlds to explore. “All of these places can be visited without the drag of realworld travel’ Parkins insists.

“The cumbersome luggage, the unreliable trains, the rude public, the sore feet. These vivid places have been compacted onto discs and hard drives, facilitating a kind of tourism and exploration that are danger free. Can virtual discovery match the thrill of real-world exploration? As with success, the imitation is powerful, compelling and, crucially, cheaper and more accessible.”

He illustrates by talking about this guy who is spending many many hours every week just traveling through the game setting of the game, Minecraft.

Four: Games provide people with a sense of belonging in a world where social connection is spare and fragile.

“The power of video games is to give people a place to belong,” we read. Parkins gives illustrations of how many gamers form groups around their gaming activity, both in character and without. Games can provide the glue to bind us into tribes that we still apparently need in this age of the atomized individual.

Five: Games [provide a place for anti-social and even vicious instincts to be expressed.

In his chapter on evil, the author makes the case that children who are raised in a violent world need violent play to help them understand and prepare (like wolf clubs practicing attacking and defending one another). “We instinctively understand that our games are violent because they reflect a violence within us as both individuals and collectives,” says Parkins, “Games offer a way to explore violence within safe and fictional borders, allowing us to confront our more primal instincts.”

Six: Games can provide a place to escape from pain, grief, and stress.

Sometimes, what humans need is emotional shelter from a storm. Psychologically, games can provide a cave in a hurricane for our minds. Parkins illustrates with a story about a man who’s child is dealing with cancer and to whom the numbing escape of a computer game becomes necessary for relief from constant fear.

“For Ferguson, bewildered with grief and confusion, Skyrim was a place he was able to visit in order to be anchored. It might seem strange that someone might choose to find their feet in a place that doesn't exist. But when reality has let you down with an event of colossal indifference and capriciousness, the reliable rules and outcomes of a video game become all the more inviting.”

“It was a real opportunity to disappear into another world.”

Seven: Games can provide a sense of mystery and amazement.

In a world where science explains everything and there are no miracles, games provide a place where amazing things can happen. “'The problem with God being dead is that nobody builds cathedrals any more,' Auriea Harvey said. 'And humans need cathedrals. Or, at very least, they need somewhere to go for refuge, reflection, sanctuary and rest.’”

“Video games have always been filled with secrets” we are informed by the author. There are hidden things to amaze everywhere. And not everyone finds them.

“Many video games, especially those with vast and complicated worlds that are filled with secrets and Easter eggs, satisfy the human desire to hunt for the truth, and offer the comforting notion that there is logic and design behind these simulated worlds, the same hope that has inspired humans throughout history to search for God.”

Eight: Games give us a chance to survive or to pretend that we will survive.

“All the best video games are about survival,” Death By Video Games tells us. And survival is the primary directive that the human brain is focused on. “This language, both written and visual, infuses video games with primal urgency that we instinctively respond to.”

“We talk of 'saving' our progress in a game, making a permanent record of what we've done within their reality. Video games are perhaps a kind of immortality project, a way to save the memory of our progress in life, a way to find glory through victory in competition and, ultimately, to somehow endure.”

Parkins describes a game called Desert Buss that requires the player to drive a bus for hours on end. “Players earn a single point for each eight-hour trip completed between the two cities [Las Vegas to Tuscon], making a Desert Bus high score perhaps the most costly in the medium.” The game is designed such that the bus veers off the road if you are not constantly driving it. “Almost all video games have this survival element coded within their rules,” Parkins writes,

“and ‘losing’ a game is usually closely linked to some idea of death. Video-game designers routinely employ the metaphor of life and death ¡n their game’s terminology: characters have ‘lives’ (when they are depleted, you are ‘over’; do well in the game and you often earn extra lives, second chances that prolong your journey and provide a buffer from death), or ‘health’, usually represented by hearts.”

“In many games you replenish this health with food (Gauntlet), medicine (Halo: Combat Evolved) or bandages (Dead Rising). The language of survival is used across the medium with such regularity that we no longer notice its origins. Some games turn the character into a ghost when they ‘die’ Spelunky) while others, such as Demon’s Souls, make you return to the site of your most recent ‘death’ in order to collect the items you dropped there. Other video-game characters, such as Worms, mark the spot of their passing with a gravestone. In Cannon Fodder, for each of your soldiers that perish during a mission a new grave is added to a virtual hillside, a mark of their death (as well as an indication of the cumulative human cost of your various sorties.”

All of these human drives can make a person feel the gravitational pull of games that are designed to capitalize on human them.

Question for Comment: If Parkins is correct, and if we do indeed have needs met via our games (or our novels or films or sports), is anything lost to us or to society if game designers get even better at their art?

Comments

Both lost and gained.

On the dangerous side, games can create addictive cycles, feedback loops based on skinner boxes that keep us doing the same things over and over again. These kinds of things are usually spotted by experienced gamers and rightly ignored, but the inexperienced are easy prey to them. At their worst, these games are essentially virtual slot machines, with all the waste that entails. As time goes on, designers get better at disguising or empowering these sorts of games- to the extent that some game designers have been hired to consult for operations in Vegas.

But games create community and meaning, places of common ground between people. When people of my parent's age at work talk about that great Patriots game last night I nod and smile and fake my way through things, but I can get a chuckle and a groan out of nearly anyone my age by saying "I used to play sports, but then I took an arrow through the knee." The friendly rivalry that exists between Yankees and Red Sox fans also exists between Stormcloak and Imperial supporters. (Both of the above are Skyrim references.)

I've heard stories of kids a generation ago wandering out to a soccer field to run into pickup games. That doesn't happen anymore, not as often I don't think- the games are scheduled, organized by adults. I wandered into Minecraft servers, met people in Runescape guilds, and built friendships over a D&D game. My roommates at college were the Sorcerer and the Zenith, my significant other played the Druid. I think a lot of ways to feel like you 'matter' have gotten harder to access- as communities get larger, it's harder to feel exceptional. When I was feeling lonely after graduation, I reached out to people by offering to run games.

Some designers are working to bilk money from their players. Others are working to foster community and team spirit. As far as I know, the latter are the only people actively working on this problem.